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Saturday, 10 October 2009

Only India can Challenge China's Primacy in Asia (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India —
More than radical Islam, the threat to the primacy of the West will come from
Sinic civilization, centered in the People’s Republic of China. Should China
continue to grow at the pace of the last 20 years for the next two decades, by
2015 the backwash created by such progress will pull Japan and South Korea into
its gravity field. This will later extend to Siberia and large swathes of
Southeast and Central Asia.

As armed
conflict would be a lose-lose proposition for all major players, the odds are
that such an expansion of geopolitical space will take place peacefully. China’s
strategy will be to make cooperation with it attractive while increasing the
costs of conflict to Asian countries that may seek to present a challenge,
principally India.

Obsessed as
Germany is with ensuring the ethnic purity of Europe by blocking immigration
even from established, English-speaking democracies outside the West, and
France with the preservation of Franco-German primacy in Europe, the European
Union is unlikely to adopt the only course that would enable it to retain its
edge in the face of rising Sinic power. This is an alliance with India.

Russian
President Dimitry Medvedev, with his obsessive focus on Europe and neglect of
Asian Russia, has been all but begging France and Germany to admit Moscow into
the European Union as an equal of these two states. This course is likely to go
the way of Turkey’s application to join the club; in other words, it will end
up in the refuse bin. This is likely to push Russia further toward being a
partner in the Sinic alliance that will be stitched together by Beijing in a
decade.

Given this, the
determination of France and Germany to preserve the post-1945 global status quo
against all comers is impacting on relations not just with Russia but with a
country crucial to the health of the Europe of the 2020s – India.

Since Hu Jintao
took over the Chinese presidency from Jiang Zemin, the Chinese Communist Party
core has focused on making China the equal of the United States and the
European Union in technology. Helped by its intelligence and security agencies
as much as by the brainpower of its scientists, China is within a decade of
challenging the EU-U.S. monopoly in systems such as aircraft and machinery.
Given the lower costs of production in China, this will mean the steady
exclusion of the EU from markets in Africa, Asia and South America.

Although a
German car may be 40 percent better than its Chinese competitor, it will no
longer be able to command a price that is 150 percent that of the competition.
Given such a lowering of prices, the need to source production platforms in
India will become acute if European manufacturers are to avoid the downsizing
now visible across the continent.

India is the
right choice because the country has institutions and language of European
origin; has a huge pool of skilled labor; and is geopolitically closer aligned
to Western values and geopolitical needs.

However, Europe
has not yet awoken to the centrality of India in its future. The just-concluded
India-EU Summit in New Delhi ended on a sour note because of EU insistence that
its consumers be denied the benefit of cheap drugs sourced from India, and a
push to lock in place protectionist measures under the guise of "labor
standards."

The EU – led in
this regard by Germany, a country that seems to value ethnicity above all other
human attributes – has been concentrating its attention and treasure on its
eastern flank, although it is by now obvious that East Europe is not a
sufficient platform to ensure primacy in global markets.

EU immigration
policy is akin to the U.S. prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Shutting the
door on immigration from countries with an ethnic composition considered
unsuitable by Berlin has encouraged an increase in "bootleg"
immigration, mainly from Africa and China.

EU market policy
is geared toward straitjacketing production within Europe, when the outsourcing
of some lines of production would expand overall output enough to create many
more jobs for Europeans, although not all of them from within Europe.

Unfortunately,
U.S. President Barack Obama seems to be moving in a similar direction in that
he seems eager to protect the two major ethnicities of his country – those of
European and African descent – against competition from South America and Asia.
In fact the relatively easy (non-bootleg) flow of human resources has been one
of the major reasons for the continued edge the United States enjoys in
international markets.

India is unique
in that it has nearly 600 million people with the social discipline needed to
integrate into a global community. This ratio compares favorably with countries
such as Albania, Bulgaria, Russia and Romania, all of which have a larger
proportion than India of individuals unwilling or unable to accept the rule of
law and the social conventions now regarded as standard by West and North
Europeans.

A marriage
between EU and Indian brainpower and muscle power could produce a fusion that
would ensure primacy in international markets for decades to come. However, as
yet the EU is looking more toward China – even though that country has clearly
indicated its aim to wrest primacy from the United States and the EU, and is
working in a sustained manner toward that outcome.

Judging by the
talk in Washington of "strategic reassurance" toward China, it is
clear that Beijing's single-minded quest has not yet triggered alarm bells in
the Obama administration. China will never be a partner as India can be,
because China is following a trajectory across the world that is increasingly
pitting it in competition with the United States and the EU.

Those in the
Obama administration who condescendingly expect China to "behave" by
following the U.S. and EU lead are oblivious to the powerful dynamic that was
unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1949, after decades of servitude to Europe, Japan,
Russia and the United States. Beijing will "behave" only until it
judges itself strong enough to no longer need such cover, which may occur as
early as 2015.

Deep-rooted ties
of civilization are likely to nudge Japan toward China in the coming years. For
the same reason, links are likely to grow between the West and India. However,
it will take a different generation of European leaders to understand such a
change and to take the initiative in forging an India-EU partnership along the
lines of the nascent India-U.S. partnership forged by former U.S. President
George W. Bush.

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About Prof. MD Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MDNalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.